Cinematical

Last Thursday, the New York Times ran an unassuming little human interest piece in its Home & Garden section called "Mystery on Fifth Avenue". It described an elaborate trick played by an architectural designer on a wealthy Manhattan couple who hired him to redo their opulent Upper East Side co-op.

Unbeknownst to the family, the architect hardwired an elaborate, National Treasure-like scavenger hunt into the apartment, building clues into the walls and the furniture, enlisting other talents to write a book and music to accompany the adventure -- which the family did not discover until months after they moved in.

It's a breezy, cute, entertaining article that is ... being developed into a movie by J.J. Abrams? Apparently so. Indeed, comedy writers Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky (TV vets who have Rainn Wilson's The Rocker in the pipeline) have already been hired to write the adaptation.

You'd be forgiven if you read the article (which I recommend) and couldn't come up with a plot for a movie, never mind a comedy. The only thing I can think of is that Forbes and Wolodarsky will seize on the backstory that the designer and his collaborators came up with for their scavenger hunt. Or maybe in the movie version, the origin of the puzzle will be something more interesting than a weirdly ambitious architect. Ghosts, maybe.